his house-museum Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour and recontextualisation in “In Pursuit of the Unorthodox”

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“In Pursuit of the Unorthodox”

Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour and recontextualisation in

his house-museum

C.T.W. Bruining

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“In Pursuit of the Unorthodox”

Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour and recontextualisation in his house-museum Master thesis Religious Studies: Religion & Cultural Heritage

C.T.W. Bruining, s3192008

First Supervisor: Dr A.J.M. Irving Second Assessor: Dr J.P. Keizer

July 31, 2020 No. of Words: 23.981

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Preface

During one lecture in the course on Museums & Religion, I stumbled upon the connection between the Grand Tour and musealisation. It was only fitting that, with my background in Classics and my interests in the world of early museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this would become the basis of my thesis. The addition of Sir John Soane’s Museum opened up this world of knowledge I would never have come across otherwise. I would like to thank Dr Andrew Irving for giving that one lecture, for his enthusiasm in guiding me through this research process, and for his invaluable feedback.

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Summary

In the world of museums, there is one kind that stands out: the house- museum. In these museums, there is a tension between the domestic and the public. In this thesis, the house-museum of English Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837) is viewed in light of the rise of the public art museum in the early nineteenth century. The study analyses the Grand Tour as a significant influence on Soane’s collection and display, and uses Henri Lefebvre’s spatial theory to analyse the basement space of the museum. Our main questions are:

How was the collection at Sir John Soane’s Museum acquired, how was it recontextualised, and how is it displayed? How did this shape early museum practice?

To answer these questions, after the first chapter, which gives an overview of the existing research on the subject, we take a telescopic approach. The second chapter begins at the geographical widest level, viewing Soane’s Grand Tour on the Continent in light of his later ideas on a museum. The third and fourth chapter zoom in on the museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, while retracing the early collection and looking at Soane’s religious beliefs. Lastly, a specific room within the museum, the basement space, is analysed using

Lefebvre’s spatial theory. In this space, Soane’s ideas and life challenges come to the fore and create a mesmerizing and fascinating space where death and afterlife are central. In conclusion, this study finds that the house-museum of Sir John Soane, the tension between death and conservation is uniquely visible.

1. Introduction

On reviewing what has been done, though I cannot say with Horace,

‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’, nor with Ovid, ‘Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignes,

nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas’,

I have yet the high gratification to know, that the best efforts in my power have been exerted, on every occasion, to promote the interest and

advantage of British Artists, by giving commissions to some of the living, and by collecting together as many of the works of our highly talented deceased countrymen as I had the means to purchase, or suitable place wherein to deposit and exhibit them to advantage.

John Soane¹

In the conclusion of his Description of My House at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1835), Sir John Soane employs the rhetorical device of understatement to reflect on the creation of his house-museum. Eschewing Horace and Ovid’s claims to

immortality through poetry, he claims satisfaction in having worked to promote and benefit British artists, by commission, collection, and exhibition of the works of ‘deceased countrymen’. Today, more than 180 years after its official foundation in 1833, Sir John Soane’s Museum is still in existence: preserved by an Act of Parliament, it endures the test of time.

Sir John Soane was born in Goring as the son of a bricklayer. His clients, patrons and connections, however, were learned men from the upper classes, who

1 John Soane and Barbara Hofland, Description of the House and Museum on the North Side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Residence of Sir John Soane ... With Graphic

Illustrations and Incidental Details (London: Privately published, 1835), 99.

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spent their days in politics or the arts. His environment was one filled with

Enlightenment thought, Romantic notions, and picturesque settings and by the time of the creation of his museum, Soane had reached the intellectual classes of eighteenth-century English society. In his architectural work, Soane was a Neoclassicist, and many of his designs and displays were influenced by his fascination with ruins, death, and funerary monuments – he was, as Margaret Richardson has observed, always “in pursuit of the unorthodox”.²His interests merge in his museum, constructed and preserved by his design, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, and in particular in the basement of this three-story building.

Here are combined Soane’s abiding interest in death and melancholy and the spatial elements that form the central focus of this study.

Our principal research questions ask: How was the collection at Sir John Soane’s Museum acquired? How was it recontextualised, and how is it

displayed? How did this shape early museum practice? Within these questions, our main objective is to outline John Soane’s Grand Tour, his influences and his ideas about creating a museum, and to uncover early museum practices Soane applied to his museum. In addition, by taking visitor experience into account, we intend to provide a broader perspective on how Sir John Soane’s Museum was received in his own day and shortly after his death.

The first chapter gives an overview of the above-mentioned topics, outlining the research field and defining key aspects. In the subsequent chapters, John Soane’s Grand Tour experience, his influences and patrons, as well as the factors that led to his establishing his extensive collection and

museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields are explored. In the final chapter, we look at the distinctive spatial character of the basement area using Henri Lefebvre’s

2 Margaret Richardson, ‘John Soane and the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli’, Architectural

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spatial triad of spatial practice, representational space, and representations of

space. Throughout, close attention is paid to Soane’s religious inclinations and involvement in freemasonry. With the addition of Lefebvre and the connection to early museums and museum studies, this study provides a new approach to the significance of Soane’s museum.

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2. Context: Soane, the Grand Tour and Early Museums

As is often the case with figures of national prominence, Sir John Soane has had many identities after his death in 1837. He was born in 1753 of a modest

middleclass background in rural England. The young son of a brick-layer was educated under the British architect George Dance the Younger, and in time became a highly successful architect. He is perhaps most famous as the architect of the Bank of England, only retiring from this position in 1833 when he was 80 years old and had worked for the Bank for forty-five years.³ His influence in the field of architecture has been researched extensively, and has been placed within many cultural and political contexts of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe. Similarly well-documented are Soane’s values and beliefs, such as his fascination with death and his association with freemasonry are.³

In the 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest in Soane, with the

appearance of important new scholarship by Gilian Darley and David Watkin in particular.⁴ Darley places Soane’s life and his buildings side by side, thus

3 Eva Schumann-Bacia, John Soane and The Bank of England (New York: Princeton

3 Giles Waterfield, Soane and Death (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1996); David Watkin, ‘Freemasonry and Sir John Soane’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 54, no. 4 (1995): 402–417.

4 Darley, John Soane; David Watkin and John Soane, Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures, ed. David Watkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);

See also Ptolemy Dean, Sir John Soane and the Country Estate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Dean, Sir John Soane and London (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2006). Dean focussed on the places surrounding Soane, on where he built and what he built there, in particular the relationship between Soane and London, thus showing how Soane was engrained in the urban structure of the city. In addition, Soane started his career with

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University Press, 1991); Gilian Darley, John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1999), 304.

attempting to understand the essence of the buildings through Soane the man.

While, in so doing she provides an extraordinary amount of fresh understanding of his architectural work, Darley’s focus remains the biographical story of Soane.⁶ David Watkin, in contrast, specializes in the Royal Academy, of which Soane was a Professor. Watkin was the first to pay close attention to the unpublished papers of Soane, which were used as preparation on the twelve lectures given at the Royal Academy.⁷

Daniel Abrahamson, in a review of three biographies of Soane, shows us the different faces Soane has had over the centuries.⁸ The early twentieth century named Soane as a great classicist through the work of Bolton, the mid-twentieth

remodelling country houses; Dean takes this as the starting point of the development of

Soane’s style over time.

6 Darley, John Soane, vi.

7 Two other contributors, both writing in the 1980s, are Pierre du la Ruffinière du Prey and Dorothy Stroud. Du Prey focused on Soane’s architectural practice and designs, but arranged his sources thematically. Du Prey’s work on Soane is innovative in the sense that he starts at the beginning of Soane’s life. He clearly demarcates the period: from Soane’s birth in 1753, until the year after his marriage, 1785, when he has established himself as an architect. Stroud, after working at Sir John Soane’s Museum for 40 years, wrote the leading monograph on the subject in 1984, including a long biographical chapter, before moving on to a selection of 72 architectural commissions. See Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982); Dorothy Stroud, John Soane - Architect (London and Boston:

Faber and Faber, 1984).

8 Daniel M. Abramson, ‘John Soane: An Accidental Romantic by Gillian Darley; Sir John

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Soane and the Country Estate by Ptolemy Dean; Sir John Soane: The Royal Academy Lectures by John Soane and David Watkin’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60, no. 3 (2001): 352–355.

century had Soane the proto-modernist. Today, the architect is seen as “a master of quotation, adaptation, and fragmentation.”⁵

2.1. Eighteenth-century Europe and the Grand Tour

For many a traveller, the so-called Grand Tour was, as the eighteenth-century French author and commentator Abbé Gabriel-François Coyer (1707-1782) put it, the “most interesting of all possible voyages.”⁶ In light of John Soane’s Tour, this section discusses the main sources and ideas on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.

At the outset, we must note that much early research on the Grand Tour, multi-disciplinary as it is, has been subject to some recurring biases. The first is that a Grand Tour had to include “a young British male patrician (that is, a member of the aristocracy or gentry)”.⁷ Thus, research has focussed on the members of the upper class. Influential writers such as Christopher Hibbert took over this definition, even though it is extremely narrow and does not include the whole picture that the term “Grand Tour” entails. Recent research has, however, underlined that the Grand Tour was not exclusive to the males of the upper class.

Lower classes also undertake these Tours, albeit in a less elaborate manner. A

5 Ibid., 352; ‘2019_12_06_Soane Bibliography’ (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2019), last modified 2019, https://www.soane.org/collections-research/research-library-andarchive.

6 Abbé Gabriel-Francois Coyer, Voyages d’Italie et de Hollande, 2 vols. (Paris: Duchesne, 1775), 1:4.

7 Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (London and New Haven: Yale University

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second bias is that only men made a Grand Tour. However, as Rosemary Sweet points out, at the end of eighteenth century it was quite normal for women travel,

“as companions, for their health, to escape domestic embarrassment at home, but also

because they too, like men, were fascinated by Italy […].”¹²

Another major bias, that the Grand Tour was a British invention, is based on the fact that the earlier research has focussed primarily on England.

Edward Chaney, for example provides an extensive bibliography of all major English works on the Grand Tour published in the twentieth century. Published as a two-part article in the British Art Journal, this “critical reading list” begins with publications from the early twentieth century, listing works in chronological order covering the history of travel, biographies, works on specific periods of the Grand Tour and a few exhibitions in the early twenty-first century. The influential bibliography leaves out, however, non-English publications, and is strongly focussed on England, America and Italy. While a justification for this one-sided perspective may be that the works mentioned were hugely influential for an early (Anglophone) understanding of the Grand Tour, and while it is true that many British people did take a Grand Tour, they, of course, did not have the monopoly on travelling or on reflecting on its significance.

12 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690-1820

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27. Other publications on women in Italy are Brian Dolan’s Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Harper Collins, 2001), which uses diaries and personal correspondence to sketch the life of these women, whereas the authors of Italy’s Eighteenth century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) chose a broader viewpoint to uncover the ways in which gender and culture shaped the perception of Italy during this time. An

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exceptions is also Katherine Turner’s study British Travel Writers in Europe 1750-1800:

authorship, gender and national identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), whose aim it is to show that the history of British travel writing is “more complex and less homogeneous”

than most other studies have made it out to be.

Anglophone researchers still dominate the field of Grand Tour studies, although critical voices can be heard.⁸ German, as well as French and Dutch research, has shown a much more diverse picture of the Grand Tour.⁹

Increasingly, scholarship has underlined that the Grand Tour involved travellers from a wide range of classes, socio-economic backgrounds, cultural and language groups, ages, and both women and men. As Giovanna Cesarani writes:

This was a community of travellers consisting of the Enlightenment’s most sensitive minds and influential writers, of reluctant youths and intrepid women, of scientists and artists, along with the many other, mostly unnamed figures, among them diplomats, merchants, sea captains, and servants, who made these travels possible.¹⁰

Giovanna Cesarani and her team at Stanford University, The Grand Tour Project, have created a digital and dynamic database, with digital visualisations, of the architects on a Grand Tour in the eighteenth century and their lives. The project provides a time chart, maps, and a graph of the educational background of these

8 Gerrit Verhoeven, ‘Vaut Le Voyage!? Nieuwe Tendensen in Het Historisch Onderzoek Naar Toerisme (1750-1950)’, Stadsgeschiedenis 4, no. 1 (2009): 65.

9 Verhoeven, ‘Vaut Le Voyage!?’; German: Joseph Imorde and Jan Pieper, Die Grand Tour in Moderne Und Nachmoderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008). French: François

Nizet, Le Voyage D’I talie et l’architecture européene: 1675-1825 (Brussels: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1988).

10 Giovanna Ceserani et al., ‘British Travelers in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture’, The American Historical Review 122, no. 2

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architects, as well as a graph on their funding. This visual aspect of the

datapresentation gives the viewer an insight in these architects and their trips. As the project leaders write: “[It] enriches our understanding of the phenomenon known as the Grand Tour by bringing us closer to the diverse travellers, elite and

otherwise, who collectively constituted its world.” ¹¹ This program has been especially

useful in visualizing Soane’s route and the places he visited.

Gerrit Verhoeven, a scholar of urban history, travel and tourism, points out two main narratives that do not comply with modern findings anymore. On the one hand, current research belies the older notions that the nineteenth century marked a sharp turning point in the developments in travel and tourism, and that this period presents a clear-cut break from “primitive” to “modern”. On the other hand, new research is revealing that exclusive destinations became more popular with the lower classes only at the end of the nineteenth century.¹² In other words, there is, overall, much more continuity than previously accepted.

Jeremy Black, in particular, has written several handbooks on different countries during and in relation to the Grand Tour that highlight the differences between each country’s experience of the phenomenon, and thereby provides a more variegated perspective on these destinations.¹³ Black, together with Christopher Hibbert, whose earlier works were published in the 1980s,

introduced cultural history methods to Grand Tour studies, combining political, cultural, and art historical approaches.¹⁴ This entailed an innovation in research

11 ‘The Grand Tour Project’, accessed March 29, 2020, https://grandtour.stanford.edu/.

12 Verhoeven, ‘Vaut Le Voyage!?’, 64–65.

13 See for example: The British and The Grand Tour (London: Routledge, 1985); Italy and The Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); France and The Grand Tour (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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on the phenomenon, as for the first time they introduced the field of (historical) tourism to the academic study, a development that would bear much fruit. John Towner, for example, examined the landscape preferences of Tourists in relation

to changes in taste and linked this to the spatial pattern of the Grand Tour over

time.¹⁵

The experience and practice of the Grand Tour not only varied across groups and cultures but also changed over time. Edward Chaney’s diachronic approach focuses on developments over time by examining the relationship between England and Italy, mainly in the Stuart and Jacobean periods.¹⁶ Treating the Grand Tour exclusively as “Anglo-Italian cultural relations” reveals the focus on Britain, but the essays combined in this volume clearly show the evolution of the classical Grand Tour. Shifting the focus of attention, the cities in Italy most frequently visited by tourists, including Soane, have been combined in Rosemary Sweet’s work. By focussing on Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice, Sweet sheds light on how these cities handled the growing mass of Tourists.¹⁷

One further note seems worth underlining: the educational nature of the Tour. In a fundamental sense, a classical Tour around Europe constituted the last part of a young man or woman’s education. Often, the male students who went on a Tour had just finished university, but did not yet have a career. The education of many middle and upper-class British subjects and Europeans was classical and

15 John Towner, ‘The Grand Tour: A Key Phase in the History of Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 12 (1985): 297–333.

16 Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998).

17 Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690-1820.

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included the reading of famous authors of ancient Rome and Classical Greece. It is therefore not surprising that these former students of the classics later visited the ancient ruins in Italy.¹⁸ Moreover, the educational aspect may also be

observed in the fact that the Tourists did not travel alone. Many had ciceroni, or

‘bear-leaders’, with them whose task it was to accompany them on their travels,

and to act as early tour guides.

Lastly, a Grand Tour was the opportunity to make connections with important people who could be of help and provide opportunities later in life: it was, to use contemporary language, a “networking opportunity”. These

connections and the cultural experience were thought to make real gentlemen of the students. For an architect and for Soane specifically, the way to secure patronage was through the sale of classical fragments and through offering measured drawings to showcase his work.¹⁹ As we will later see, Soane was motivated to learn as much as he could through what he saw and through the people he met.

2.2. The Grand Tour, collecting, and musealisation

An important aspect of the Tour was the acquisition of sculptures and paintings.

As J.B.S. Morritt, a contemporary of Soane, observed about collecting antiquities:

“Some we steal, some we buy, and our court is much adorned with them.”²⁰ The traveller bought for himself, but also for friends and family or potential clients

18 Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 53–54.

19 See for instance Iain Gordon Brown, The Grand Tour and Its Influence on

Architecture, Artistic Taste and Patronage (Edinburgh: Italian Cultural Institute, 2008).

20 John B. S. Morritt, The Letters of John B. S. Morritt of Rokeby: Descriptive of

Journeys in Europe and Asia Minor in the Years 1794–1796, ed. George Eden Marindin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 179.

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back home. A whole market existed to comply with the wishes of the people who could afford to buy.

Jonathan Scott’s Pleasures of Antiquity is one of the most comprehensive studies of British collectors and collecting antiquities.²¹ Scott’s study opens with a treatment of the papal collections as the fundamental starting point for

understanding the origins and development of the phenomenon. These

collections were established before the height of the Grand Tour and would have formed the ideas about establishing collections for Tourists and other visitors.²²

An important question is why people collected these sculptures and other objects from antiquity.²³ Focussing on this question, Ruth Guilding sets out to discover, primarily on the basis of British sources, the reasons and the evolution of this fascination. Guilding’s scholarship reveals that sculpture, and the

collecting of it, is ingrained in “the ideals of connoisseurship and taste”. The possession of sculpture lends one an authority and has a connotation of “civilized power”.²⁴ A Grand Tour was the perfect opportunity to collect, be that sculpture or other valuables, and therefore can be understood as a tool to obtain this power.

As we will see below, Soane did not collect on his Grand Tour, as he was a starting architect without the means to indulge in such pleasures. For him, it was the experience of travel that formed a large part of his education and what would ultimately influence his museum. In the research on the Grand Tour, the

collections that were formed after these tours are mostly mentioned as side notes, or as a given. While it is clear that Grand Tourists were interested in antiquity and

21 Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity.

22 27 Ibid., 1.

23 Ruth Guilding, Owning the Past: Why the British Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640- 1840 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014).

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were looking to take home souvenirs, it remains unclear in Grand Tour

scholarship how, when and why these objects were displayed in buildings open to the ordinary public, set in a designed space.

Yet, these early collections form the basis of many museums that still exist today. The Musei Capitolini began in 1471 in Rome, but opened for the broader public in 1734. The British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris, now leading institutions, were established and opened for the public in the eighteenth century; in 1759 and 1792 respectively. These large art museums evolved from the smaller practices of collecting, often seen in the cabinets of curiosities, the

Wunderkammers and studioli, but as we will see, the country house played a role in this evolution as well. Today these country houses are seen as sites of national identity, and the first wave of growing tourism in the late eighteenth century may be the prelude to the growing awareness of the importance of these country houses and their collections.

It is critical, however, not to dismiss the fact that the opening of country houses was only possible because of the improving infrastructure, and increased professionalization of the way of broadcasting information to the public in the period.²⁵ In their work on the origin of the museal institution, Hanneke Ronnes &

Bob van Toor even go as far as to define the English country house as a

“protomuseum.”²⁶ In the context of Dutch travellers to England, they see the rise of modern museum practices on these estates, such as guidebooks, ticket selling and tour guides. Their principal focus, however, is on the Dutch country house of William III, Paleis Het Loo. The first ‘guidebook’ for this palace was a reprint of

25 Jocelyn Anderson, Touring and Publicizing England’s Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 5.

26 Hanneke Ronnes and Bob Van Toor, ‘Op Bezoek Bij de Adel. De Buitenplaats Als “proto- Museum” Vanaf de Late Zeventiende Tot de Late Negentiende Eeuw’, Virtus 21

(2014): 87–110.

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multiple drawings from the late seventeenth century and was published in the 1780s.²⁷ At the same time at Horace Walpole’s estate Strawberry Hill, a system of ticketing was developed.²⁸ Ronnes and Van Toor argue that, while the cabinets of curiosities were significant for the rise of the museum, it was the practice of

visiting castles and townhouses in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries that

played a key role in the evolution of the public aspect of the museum.²⁹

Musealisation both as a phenomenon and as an approach for critical analysis will be important for the present study. In his introductory article to the 2005 volume Bezeten van Vroeger, Pim den Boer traces the origins of the concept and its introduction into academic discourse back to Hermann Lübbe and his influential lecture Der Fortschritt und das Museum in 1982.³⁰ Lübbe’s aim was first to elucidate the reason for the growing number of new museums. Secondly, he used the term Musealisierung to explain the institutionalisation of the historic interest of contemporary society in the long eighteenth century, the period of the height of the Grand Tour. Lübbe argues that as all over Europe revolutions broke out, monarchies were overturned and new inventions and ideas changed society, people tended to look back to fixed points in history; they anchor their own beliefs to the past, thus creating a heritage. This is something David Lowenthal also

27 Ibid., 97.

28 Ibid., 98.

29 Ibid., 92.

30 Pim Den Boer, ‘Geschiedenis, Herinnering En “Lieux de Mémoire”’, in Bezeten van Vroeger, ed. R. Van Der Laarse (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2005), 40–58. Hermann Lübbe, Der Fortschritt und das Museum: über den Grund unseres Vergnügens an historischen Gegenstanden Bithell Memorial Lectures, 1981 (London: Institute of

Germanic Studies, University of London, 1982).

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observed in the 1980s.³¹ Today, questions such as “what is heritage?” and “whose heritage is it?” are at the front of the research field.

A pioneer in the philosophy of museum studies is Tony Bennett and his The Birth of the Museum.³² Employing a Foucauldian perspective, Bennett explores the museum not simply as a place of education, but also as a way to reform the

people and their social routines, as a place of disciplined surveillance. In this way,

the institutionalisation of the museum is closely linked to politics and governmental decisions: “[…] the museum’s formation […] in coming to be thought of as useful for governing, was fashioned as a vehicle for the exercise of new forms of power.”³³ Through this “Exhibitionary Complex”, museums had to readdress their increasingly middle-class public and form their displays

accordingly to this public, and in this process “they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power … throughout society.”³⁴ In essence, modern public museums were shaped as, to use Lefebvre’s term, new spaces of representation to harness new social purposes.³⁵

2.3. Sir John Soane’s Museum

The musealisation of John Soane’s house and the opening of his collection to be viewed by the public must be placed in this changing tide of “educating the public”.

It is true that Soane’s house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the centre of

London is not comparable in size to the manor houses of the aristocracy, and

31 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

32 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995).

33 Ibid., 19.

34 Ibid., 60–61.

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Soane did not have an aristocratic background; he was the son of a bricklayer. Sir John Soane’s Museum was never located in a country house. Nevertheless, it was a private home, opened for visiting, and may be usefully understood as part of this broader phenomenon.

As a house-museum, it falls therefore into a different category than the art museum conceived and intended from the outset as primarily a public space. A museum containing the personal collection of one person tells the visitor a different story than an art museum that may focus on one or more artists,

periods, styles, or attempt to be representative of a broad range of artefacts from

the past. A house-museum does not (aim to) tell a national story. It contains

objects and artefacts that the collector, for known or unknown personal reasons, considered worthy to preserve. As Anne Higonnet elegantly puts it in her

discussion of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collector’s museum, these houses were not built for the collector, but for the collection.³⁶

In this respect, the recent publication by two cousins Gamboni offers a fresh approach to the Soane and other similar museums.⁴² They explain their choice to focus their work exclusively on museums created by artists or collectors rationale as follows:

Artists’ and collectors’ museums enjoy an ambivalent reputation and a paradoxical topicality. Their number constantly increases and the oldest of them attract ever new visitors, yet the unchanging nature of their

36 Anne Higonnet, ‘Introduction to A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift’, last modified 2009, accessed March 29, 2020,

https://projects.mcah.columbia.edu/hispanic/essays/a-museum-of-ones-own.php. ⁴² Dario Gamboni and Libero Gamboni, The Museum as Experience: An Email Odyssey through Artists’ and Collectors’ Museums (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019).

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collections and presentation is often decried and seen as running counter to the “progress” in the name of which large museums outbid each other in establishing new branches and organizing events.³⁷

Soane was at once collector, designer, architect and curator of his collection and museum, and his own house. This makes for a unique coherence in the museum, as Gamboni and Gamboni note, however much of a labyrinth the buildings might

seem to be. By buying and transforming the buildings at 12-14 Lincoln’s Inn

Fields, Soane integrated his house and his museum, thus making a personal statement as a collector and as an architect. Sir John Soane’s Museum still exists today and due to an Act of Parliament Soane drew up in 1833, very little has changed in the collection or the display.

Literature about Soane’s museum is focused on the collection and the museum has naturally published catalogues for most exhibitions. A very extensive bibliography, as well as most of the collection, can be found on the website of the museum.³⁸ The publications are divided into four categories: the museum, the collection, Sir John Soane and his architecture, and the exhibition catalogues and associated publications. The most recent monograph on the museum has been written by Tim Knox, a former director of the museum.³⁹ Providing a broad

37 Dario Gamboni and Libero Gamboni, ‘Magic Mirrors: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London’, in The Museum as Experience: An Email Odyssey through Artists’ and Collectors’ Museums (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 6. The scholars’ focus on the visitor’s experience is refreshing and will be used in the following chapters.

38 ‘Sir John Soane’s Museum Collection Online’, http://collections.soane.org/home;

‘2019_12_06_Soane Bibliography’, https://www.soane.org/collectionsresearch/research-library-andarchive.

39 Tim Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum London (London: Merrell, 2009).

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introduction, ranging from John Soane as a person to the museum after his death, this work accurately describes the museum to a diverse audience. Knox reiterates how unique this museum was and still is: “The extraordinary accumulations and arrangements of John Soane were hardly typical for an architect-collector of his era.”⁴⁰ In general, there is a strong focus on specific objects, sections and

highlights of the collection, and on the history of the buildings at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in relation to renovations and the city of London, perhaps with an eye to contemporary tourist visitors. The spatial aspect of the museum, as well as displays, are not as heavily researched and these aspects will

thus be the main focus of this study.

3. John Soane’s Grand Tour, 1778-80

I was sent to Italy to pursue my studies … This was the most fortunate event of my life, for it was the means by which I formed those connections to which I owe all the advantages I have since enjoyed.

John Soane⁴⁷

After Soane had won a travelling scholarship from the Royal Academy for his design of a Triumphal Bridge in December 1777, he went on a three-year Grand Tour from 1778-1780.⁴¹ The scholarship consisted of £60 per annum for three years and included a further £30 to cover additional travel expenses for each way.

On his tour, Soane visited the important Continental cities like Paris and Rome, he went to the ancient ruins of Pompeii, and visited the island of Sicily in May

40 Ibid., 15.

41 Darley, John Soane, 17; Stroud, John Soane - Architect, 284 et seq.

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1779 and again in June of the same year.⁴² As Darley has noted, not unlike many travellers and tourists today, “Soane’s attention was quickly absorbed by his intense excitement at finally standing in front of the remains of Roman classical antiquity.”⁴³

47 John Soane, Memoirs of the Professional Life of an Architect, between the Years 1768

and 1835, Written by Himself, Privately Printed (London: James Moyes, 1835), page unknown.

Early in his stay in Rome, however, Soane was to make the acquaintance of a figure whose patronage was to exercise an important role in his future career. In the autumn of 1778, when Soane was getting adjusted to the rhythm of Rome, he met the Bishop of Derry, the later 4^th Earl of Bristol, Frederick Hervey. Soane quickly became friendly with the bishop, a patron of the arts and architecture, and left Rome on April 19^th 1780, well before the end of his scholarship, to work for the newly appointed Earl Bishop. Soane was commissioned to recreate the Temple of Vesta, which will be discussed later in this chapter, a summer dining room and opportunities for clients in Ireland where the Earl Bishop had his seat.

Fifty-eight years later, Soane wrote in his Memoirs of a Professional Life:

“Experience … taught me how much I had overrated the magnificent promises

42 Giovanna Ceserani, Giorgio Caviglia, and Nicole Coleman, ‘Interactive Visualization for British Architects on the Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Timechart of Travels’,

Mapping the Republic of Letters Data Visualizations, last modified April 2017, accessed June 15, 2020, http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/publications/grandtour/timechart/;

Darley, John Soane, 21–55; Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 109–147.

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and splendid delusions of the Lord Bishop of Derry.”⁴⁴ John Soane returned to London in 1780. This chapter aims to discover some of the influences of the Tour on Soane’s architectural designs, and to shed light on Soane’s early interests. Our question is specifically, how did Soane’s Grand Tour influence the design and

display of his museum?

3.1. Travelling through Europe: networks and people

In 1768, when John Soane was just 15 years old, he worked in the office of

architect George Dance the Younger (1741-1825).⁴⁵ Dance had taken a Grand Tour and lived and worked in Italy for a period (1759-1765), and thus Soane had a wealth of knowledge at his disposal. Not only could he learn from Dance’s personal instruction and recollections, he would have known his employer’s extensive library.⁴⁶ This library familiarised Soane with English, French and

44 De la Ruffinière du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect, 118; Soane, Memoirs of the Professional Life of an Architect, 16.

45 James Stevens Curl and Susan Wilson, ‘Dance, George, Jun.’, The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

46 Darley, John Soane, 9.

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Italian texts and folio’s that were at the base of eighteenth-century architectural education. A copy of Treatise on Civil Architecture by Sir William Chambers (1723-1796), published only in 1768 and preserved in Dance’s library, would, for example, become a staple source on classical architecture and an introduction into architecture for Soane.⁴⁷ Chambers, like George Dance and his brother Nathaniel, was one of the founders of the Royal Academy in London, which would become a central element to Soane’s career.⁴⁸ When Soane asked what aspects of classical architecture he should study, just before leaving for Italy, Chambers advised: “Always see with your own eyes… [you] must discover their true beauties, and the secrets by which they are produced.”⁴⁹ Being a rather esoteric approach to architecture, this comment stayed with Soane; he was more eager to

see and draw and discover the buildings of Italy than his fellow architects on a

Tour at this time.⁵⁰

In June 1776, Soane was working on his entry into the Gold Medal

competition of the Royal Academy, which he entered with a design of a Triumphal Bridge, and for which he was to win the scholarship that would enable him to travel, like his master, to Italy. One Sunday, he was invited to join a 21^st birthday party, but decided to stay home to work, as Sunday was his only day off. On this trip, the other friends hired a boat, which tragically overturned in the Thames.

47 Ibid.

48 John Harris, ‘Chambers, Sir William (1722–1796), Architect’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

49 Darley, John Soane, 21. Chambers wrote this in a letter to Edward Stevens, who was also an architect traveling to Rome. Soane received a copy of this letter from Chambers when he set out to Italy himself.

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Soane’s friend James King could not swim and drowned. Soane went on to win the Gold Medal with his design, but, unsurprisingly, the tragedy had a profound effect on him. Soane himself could not swim. His realisation that he escaped death on this day while working on the project that would win him the Gold Medal and scholarship, made this loss significant in Soane’s starting career as an architect. Before he departed for Italy, Soane designed a mausoleum for King as what has been called an “architectural elegy”.⁵¹ It is the first direct link that can be made between his experience with death and his later funerary architecture, a theme to which we shall return.

At the time John Soane left England, he was twenty-five years old.

Verhoeven argues that in the late eighteenth century, the classical Grand Tour was already beginning to change from a coming-of-age experience into more of a leisure trip.⁵² This evolution of the Grand Tour, boosted by an ever-improving infrastructure that surrounded travel and tourism, allowed more layers of society to explore other countries for pleasure. Indeed, the route taken would be more

predictable and guidebooks led the tourist to most highlights. ⁵³ This evolution

was not, however, a clear-cut break from the educational Tour, as has been discussed in the previous chapter. It is now accepted that eighteenth-century

51 Giles Waterfield, Soane and Death (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1996), 115.

52 Verhoeven, ‘Vaut Le Voyage!?’, 64–65.

53 Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1–

3. See for the development of the Grand Tour and the history of tourism: Towner, ‘The Grand Tour: A Key Phase in the History of Tourism’; Verhoeven, ‘Vaut Le Voyage!?'. ⁶¹ Verhoeven, ‘Vaut Le Voyage!?', 64. This Dutch article provides a large number of sources into tourism studies, while at the same time offering light critique on the stereotypical views on this research field.

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travel was more sophisticated than previously thought, and that

nineteenthcentury travels, earlier thought of as revolutionary, displayed much more continuity than assumed in earlier research.⁶¹

Given that he travelled to Italy on a scholarship, Soane’s goals can be interpreted primarily as educational and professional. One of the requirements of the Royal Academy was that the architects had to send in designs for a

competition during their time abroad. In the Council Minutes of the Royal Academy, in the entry for 3 July 1772, we read that scholarship recipients, like Soane, were expected “to send home annually a Performance for the Exhibition”

or risk losing their stipend.⁵⁴ This was important for Soane, as he had little money to travel on his own; this was his chance to explore classical architecture and he was determined to use it. Having left London on 18 March, after two months of travelling through Europe and visiting Continental landmarks such as Paris and Versailles, Soane arrived in Rome on May 2, 1778, and remained there until Christmas of the same year. His companion on this first leg of the Tour was, among others, Robert Furze Brettingham (1750-1820), a fellow student of

architecture at the Academy.⁵⁵ The two remained in contact later in life and both

were active in freemasonry.

Soane did not write home often during his Grand Tour, which makes reconstruction of the exact route difficult. Travelling to Rome, Soane and Brettingham stayed in Paris in early 1778. For this city, no guideline existed for

54 Royal Academy, Council Minutes, vol 1, p. 139 cited in De la Ruffinière du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect, 168.

55 William Palin, ‘“Brettingham, Robert William Furze (c.1750-1820), Architect.”’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Tourists, and little information survives on this particular stay. Soane and Brettingham met the engineer of the city Jean-Rodolphe Perronet and admired his Pont de Neuilly which linked Paris with the country to the west.⁵⁶ Paris was at this point experiencing enormous Neoclassical building activities, and

presumably, as it was such a contrast to London at that time, this would be of interest to Soane.

As we have noted, soon after his arrival in Rome, Sonae met, and developed a friendly acquaintance with Frederick Hervey, the Bishop of Derry had a

reputation of not following up on his commissions and making empty promises.

Even so, he was presumably a charismatic person, or Soane may have seen his usefulness as a patron, as Soane travelled with him for quite some time. The first trip they took together was to Naples on December 22, 1778. They returned to Rome on March 12.

Two friends made at this time to prove helpful back in England were

Thomas Pitt⁵⁷ and Philip Yorke⁵⁸. Both were politicians and had an interest for

56 Margaret Richardson and MaryAnne Stevens, John Soane Architect Master of Light and Space (London: The Royal Academy of Arts, 1999), 96.

57 Roland Thorne, ‘Pitt, Thomas, First Baron Camelford (1737–1793), Politician and Dilettante’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

58 James Macmullen Rigg and Hallie Rubenhold, ‘Yorke, Philip, Third Earl of Hardwicke (1757–1834), Politician’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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architecture. Soane travelled with Thomas Pitt’s companions: his doctor Mr Pennington, and a banker friend, Sir William Molesworth with whom he travelled to Pompeii and Paestum. Pitt, later the First Baron Camelford, came from a family of politicians and was the nephew of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), who held the position of Prime Minister of Great Britain between 1783-1801 and of the United Kingdom from 1804-1806.⁵⁹ Prior to being elevated to the peerage in 1784, Thomas Pitt had himself served as a Member of Parliament of the House of Commons. Soane’s friendship with Pitt was particularly valuable, for Pitt was one of the few friends Soane met on his Tour that would give him work upon his return. Even though Pitt was from a very different background and was fifteen years older than Soane, he would ask his advice and invite suggestions on architectural topics.⁶⁰

In essence, Pitt was undertaking the role of Soane’s patron. It was an advantageous relationship for the young architect. As Darley notes:

Pitt, in contrast [to the Bishop of Derry], was a decisive and erudite man, equal to any architect in his theoretical and historical grasp of the subject,

but he also knew exactly what his limits were and when to hand over to a

professional.⁶¹

When he returned to England, Pitt’s connections would give Soane the work he so desperately needed. Being a member of the Dilettanti Society since 1763, Pitt had the connections and the means to act as a patron for Soane.

59 John Patrick William Ehrman and Anthony Smith, ‘Pitt, William [Known as Pitt the Younger] (1759–1806), Prime Minister’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

61 Ibid., 64.

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Philip Yorke (1757-1834; 3^rd Earl of Hardwicke from 1790) and his family would become the other important employers of John Soane in this early period of his architectural practice after his return. Yorke was the nephew of an

important patron by the same name, the Lord High Chancellor and 1^st Earl Hardwicke, and was also a nephew of one of the founders of the British Museum, the 2^nd Earl Hardwicke. Soane and Yorke met at Paestum in 1779, Yorke recording that he met an architect “by the name Soane who is an ingenious young man now studying at Rome”.⁶²

Yorke’s early impression of Soane stayed with him after his return to England. In the early 1790s, Yorke commissioned Soane to remodel the inside of his newly inherited Wimpole Hall, near Cambridge. Soane designed a yellow drawing-room for the country house, completely changing the colour scheme and used arabesque patterns as decoration, inspired by the antique decorations both Soane and Yorke had seen in Rome.⁶³ These early commissions from both the Pitt family and the Yorke family were the start of John Soane’s career in architecture, meaning he could now afford two floors, dinner and service at 53 Margaret Street, London, for £40 a year.⁶⁴

The primary sources available, such as tour guides and diaries, suggest that

Soane realized that this opportunity to travel to Rome and other places was an excellent way to connect with future clients. Even so, as Du Prey writes: “Soane is an example of someone who brought to realisation almost none of the projects he initiated for acquaintances on the Grand Tour.”⁶⁵ This was not for lack of trying

62 This quote from Yorke is cited in Darley, John Soane, 38; and in Du Prey, John Soane’s Architectural Education, 182.

63 Ibid., 104.

64 Ibid., 64; Stroud, John Soane - Architect, 54.

65 De la Ruffinière du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect, 109.

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on Soane’s part and can mostly be linked to unfulfilled promises from these acquaintances, such as the Earl Bishop Hervey.⁶⁶

Not all of Soane’s connections in Italy were English however. Soane brought to Italy a letter of introduction with him from Sir William Chambers to the ageing Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778).⁶⁷ He met the famous Venetian engraver in what was to be the last year of his life, and struck up a friendship with him.

Piranesi’s Carceri and Vedute engravings and drawings were hugely influential on Soane, especially viewed in light of his house-museum. The Carceri depict

Piranesi’s fascination with scale and monumentality, but they never show a complete building and are often structurally impossible.⁶⁸ This monumentality returns in the later published Vedute di Roma, which depict landscapes and monuments in Rome. These Vedute were widely known by Grand Tourist, but the

“double vision of ancient and contemporary Rome” as Piranesi presents it, imposed a sense of disappointment on the Tourist when they saw Rome and her monuments.⁶⁹

Soane later wrote in his Description of 1835, in the section on the Picture

Room, that he was presented with original drawings by Piranesi when he met him⁷⁸:

The cabinets on the north side contain four prints of buildings in Rome, by Piranesi, comprising the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Pantheon, the

66 See for other unfulfilled commissions: Ibid., 113, 118–121; Darley, John Soane, 60–61.

67 Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity, 246.

68 Louis Marchesano, ‘Invenzioni Capric Di Carceri: The Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)’, Getty Research Journal, no. 2 (2010): 154.

69 Richard Wendorf, ‘Piranesi’s Double Ruin’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2

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Tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the Arch of Constantine, presented to me by that great Artist.⁷⁹

The Vedute depict the monuments as ruins, but Piranesi skilfully added missing parts of the building. While Soane was himself not a great draftsman, when we compare the etchings with the architectural drawings of Soane’s pupil and

78 The Soane Museum website has digitalized versions of most of the etchings, among

which are the etchings Soane got from Piranesi personally. Soane bought a dresser with drawings by Piranesi after the death of one of the Adam brothers: Adam vol.26/163 and Adam vol.56/146. The reference numbers of the Piranesi drawings in the Soane collection are: P31-34, 51, 54, 69-72, 74-77, 125, 132, 133, 139, 140, 146, 391, 396, 397, and 413. ⁷⁹ Soane and Hofland, Description of the House and Museum, 15–17, 20, which specifies that two works are drawings: in the same Picture Room are also “two of the series of original drawings of the Ruins at Paestum, by Piranesi, from which he made the

engravings.” The other descriptions shine a light on the way these drawings and etchings are displayed, namely: “On the outer side of the movable planes on the south side of the room are eight more of the views of the Ruins of Temples at Paestum, by Piranesi;” and

“at the west end of the room, within the cabinet on the right-hand side, are a print of the Coliseum at Rome, and two views on the Temples at Paestum, by Piranesi; […] The lefthand cabinet contains a view of Ruins of a Temple at Paestum, by Piranesi. […] On the doors of the cabinets at this west end of the Picture-room are two drawings by Piranesi of the Ruins of Paestum.” In 2011-2012 the drawings and etchings were replaced with facsimiles in the original frames and the originals were moved to the Research Library.

business companion Joseph Gandy, especially his drawing of Soane’s Bank of England, Piranesi’s influence becomes clear.⁷⁰

70 See Kerianne Stone and Gerard Vaughan, The Piranesi Effect (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2015) on the general influence of Piranesi; John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi,

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While he often returned to Rome in the period between 1778-80, Soane travelled through Italy with various different groups of architects and artists. He did not take a regular route through Italy. He visited the major cities like Rome, Naples and Florence, but also travelled to Sicily, quite an unusual destination at the time. In the database of Cesarani, we find that Soane visited a remarkable number of places, over thirty, with multiple stays in Rome and Naples. This is significantly more than any other architect on a Tour in this period. Brettingham, for instance, only visited Rome and Naples, and George Dance visited only 5 locations in Italy.⁷¹ This again shows Soane’s eagerness to study the classical sites and architecture, as well as his awareness of the fact that this was his chance to do so, given his social status at the time.

Soane’s first trip outside of Rome was in the summer of 1778 to Tivoli, where he saw Hadrian’s Villa, “the most evocative of Roman sites with its massive brick standing structures, its subterranean passages and above all its redolent atmosphere.”⁷² Here he saw the Temple of Vesta for the first time, a building which would stay with him for the rest of his life. Soane, together with the Bishop of Derry, set off for Naples on 22 December 1778. On the way, they visited the collection of Stefano Borgia in Velletri, an eclectic and exquisite collection of ethnographic and artistic objects from all over the world. From Velletri, the two

followed the Via Appia south, a route with ruins and ancient monuments for the travel companions to visit. Once arrived in Naples, it appears from Soane’s notes

Paestum & Soane (Munich: Prestel, 2013) is a great source on Soane and Piranesi.

71 Ceserani, Caviglia, and Coleman, ‘Interactive Visualization for British Architects on the Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Timechart of Travels’,

http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/publications/grandtour/timechart/. See this visualisation for other architects in Italy.

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and diaries that this city could not grip Soane’s attention. It seems that Soane had a lot to learn on the subject of making social calls and participating in the

Neapolitan social scene.⁷³ From Naples, Soane travelled to Pompeii and Paestum.

He visited Pompeii in a truly Romantic style, seeing it for the first time in the moonlight, the more exciting as this was forbidden. He sketched the Temple of the Egyptian-Roman goddess Isis and a plan of the Via delle Tombe. Combined with the monumental Via Appia, it is evident that Soane had struck up a

fascination with the ancients’ commemoration of the dead.⁷⁴ Following the visit to Pompeii, Soane went to Paestum, where he met Yorke, as we noted above.

Familiar with the drawings and engravings of Piranesi and the drawings of his former master George Dance, Soane saw and was supposedly fascinated by the three temples of Neptune, Ceres and Hera. A few days after Easter in 1779,

Soane and his companions sailed from Naples to Palermo.⁷⁵

To familiarize himself with Italy, the language and the people, Soane used a popular guidebook, Letters from Italy, written by Lady Anna Riggs Miller (1741-

73 Ibid., 33.

74 Ibid., 36.

75 De la Ruffinière du Prey, John Soane: The Making of an Architect, 110–111, 139–142.

These companions were Thomas Bowdler, Roland Burdon, Henry Greswolde Lewis, John Patteson, and John Stuart (the heir to the baronetcy of Allanbank). This trip to Sicily was led by the guidebook of Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta, leading the group to Agrigento, Syracuse and Mount Etna, among other places. In July 1779, Soane set of from Rome again to the northern regions of Italy, visiting Bologna, Parma, Milan,

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1781), who had visited the country only a few years prior to Soane.⁷⁶ It had long been common to use one or more guidebooks on a Grand Tour, but as earlier versions of such literature consisted mostly of journal entries and letters, they were not the most reliable of sources. The observations made were highly subjective and sometimes contained falsehoods and misinterpretations. As the Grand Tour evolved during the eighteenth century, however, so did its manuals.

The rise of tourism, as discussed above, and the evolution of the Tour in an extended leisure trip, also led to professionalisation in the tourism industry, with the guidebook as an excellent example of this phenomenon.

As the title suggests, Lady Miller’s guidebook consisted mostly of

observations written to a friend. The letters were not received well by everyone;

Horace Walpole, for instance, noted that she did “not spell one word of French or Italian right through her three volumes of travel.”⁷⁷

Lady Miller’s book was one that the young architect clearly frequently had in his hand when travelling: brief notes in Soane’s hand appear in the margins of the text, such as “Exceedingly fine indeed” or “A most beastly composition,” but he also made corrections and additions where he thought necessary.⁷⁸ When Lady Miller wrote that the dome of the Pantheon did not have “the smallest vestige remaining of any metal”, Soane’s observed more precisely that “the cornice ... is

76 Anna Riggs Miller, Letters from Italy: Describing the Manners, Customs, Antiquities, Paintings, &c. of That Country, in the Years MDCCLXX and MDCCLXXI: To a Friend Residing in France (London: Edward & Charles Dilly, 1777).

77 Elizabeth Lee and Rebecca Mills, ‘Miller [Née Riggs], Anna, Lady Miller (1741–1781), Poet and Salon Hostess’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004).

78 ‘“Letters from Italy …”, 1777, Annotated by Soane, 1778-80’’, http://collections.soane.org/SKETCH17.

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all of Bronze & part of the Gilding rem[ain]”. ⁷⁹ These amusing comments show us

that Soane was a focussed budding architect, minute and precise in his

observations. The fact that he wrote these comments down make clear once again that he was not on a leisure trip, but intended to have a serious future in

architecture, starting with this Tour. Soane still had the book when he returned home and it is still in the Soane Museum’s archive today.

3.2. Collecting on tour

While Soane carried Piranesi’s atmospheric depictions of ruined antiquities and monuments of Roman architecture with him when he returned to England, he did not arrive with any antiquities. In fact, the only object he took home was a piece of stucco plaster from Pompeii, dated at pre 80 AD.⁸⁰ As the museum catalogue describes it, this may be the first piece to enter the collection. In the first

inventories of the museum, drawn up directly after Soane died in 1837, this stucco fragment is listed in a group of different small objects in the drawer of a table in the Library, but a note was added that it was found in “different places” around the house.⁸¹

The fact that Soane did not bring back a larger collection might seem strange, as many travellers went to Italy to see and to buy. Collecting was not, however, Soane’s primary goal: he was a starting architect travelling on a

scholarship and had not started his own architectural practice yet. His interest in

79 Ibid.

80 Tim Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum London (London: Merrell, 2009), 19.

his house-museum Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour and recontextualisation in “In Pursuit of the Unorthodox”

“In Pursuit of the Unorthodox”

Sir John Soane’s Grand Tour and recontextualisation in

his house-museum

C.T.W. Bruining

Preface

Summary

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Context: Soane, the Grand Tour and Early Museums

2.1. Eighteenth-century Europe and the Grand Tour

2.2. The Grand Tour, collecting, and musealisation

2.3. Sir John Soane’s Museum

3. John Soane’s Grand Tour, 1778-80

3.1. Travelling through Europe: networks and people

3.2. Collecting on tour